We are publishing below the text of a leaflet handed out by the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista), our sister organisation in the IBRP, at the European Social Forum held in Florence, 6th-10th November.

US imperialism is on the verge of once again launching death and destruction on the Iraqi population. Once again Saddam Hussein is enemy number one, threatening peace and democracy. In reality, Saddam Hussein was very useful when he butchered thousands of Iranian and Iraqi proletarians, both on his own account and on that of the Western and Soviet imperialisms. He is also useful now (as he was in 1991) as a cover for the hypocrisy of the war mongers, according to whom Iraq will have at its disposal weapons of mass destruction. Twelve years of embargoes and bombings have exhausted the Iraqi population and have driven society back decades.

As in 1991 in Kosovo and Afghanistan, what is at stake is who will control oil and the financial yield it brings. In short, the continuing global supremacy of US imperialism is in confrontation with rival imperialisms, such as the European Union, Russia, China and Japan. In fact all these powers are showing impatience, if not open opposition to the US, which forces them to buy petrol in dollars and then gets a huge rake-off in financial revenues. As a result they are working towards the establishment of an alternative petrol market, starting with petrol from Iran and Iraq. It is no coincidence that both stand under a US embargo.

The intensification of imperialist rivalry has come about as a direct result of the capitalist crisis which, while intensifying and multiplying hotbeds of war, has also intensified the global attacks on the living and working conditions of the proletariat, including increased unemployment, temporary employment, low salaries and the robbery of the welfare state. The working class faces super-exploitation to offset falling profits and to feed growing financial speculation. An increase in both exploitation and imperialist war - these are the fixed paths on the journey capitalism always takes while searching for a way out of its crises.

And, as ever in a period of crisis, the reformists show their impotence at resolving the enormous problems of an exploited and oppressed humanity in a world driven to destruction.

Genetically incapable of understanding the mechanisms of capital, the reformists deceive themselves and others as to the existence of a capitalism with a human face (with equitable and fair trade, incomes worthy of citizens, etc). They fool themselves and others about the real nature of the state and bourgeois democracy, which, in their dreams, leads to a Europe more democratic and more peaceful than the US. In short they adhere to a reformism which believes it can rescue and integrate into its strategies those unions which, on both a European and global level, have accepted and imposed on the world’s working class daily attacks under the banner of neo-liberalism.

Their reformism leaves itself open - involuntarily of course - to a ferocious repression of the masses (as seen in Genova in 2001).

Neither civil society, nor any different (?!) use of bourgeois institutions or the parliamentary parties of the left, nor the mysterious ‘multitudes’ which simply march along the street can realistically oppose war and exploitation.

Only the struggle of the working class in the factories, in the workplace and in the streets can do so, and only then if it is genuinely self-organised and outside of and against the union’s logic.

Only a revolutionary party organised on an international scale, a party which has criticised Stalinism and its heirs, can show the way to a better world.

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